Tag Archives: Australia-Indonesia Centre

2016, Australia-Indonesia Collaboration

What roles do women play in fishing communities?

Opportunities for alternative livelihoods in fishing communities in Indonesia are being investigated by a team of Indonesian and Australian scientists.

They’re working to understand fisheries and the options for women in coastal areas, while reducing the pressure on targeted marine resources.

Small-scale fisheries are an important source of food security and income in developing countries. Many are also growing into international exporters, but they can place a huge strain on fish populations.

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2016, Australia-Indonesia Collaboration

Leapfrogging towards water sensitive cities: The Australia-Indonesia Centre Urban Water Cluster

How can cities grow and thrive in an era of climate change? This is a challenge faced by both Australia and Indonesia. With ever-increasing population shifts towards urban environments, it is crucial to make cities sustainable.

Australian cities are adopting water sensitive approaches. Melbourne Water, for example, has created over 10,000 raingardens. But progress is slow, in part because of the existing massive traditional water infrastructure.

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2016, Australia-Indonesia Collaboration

Signs of the dietary environment

School-aged children are surrounded by messages about food and nutrition, from shop signs to brand advertising. Linguists from Indonesia and Australia have developed a new way of studying how this affects them, using smartphones and clever analysis.

In a project financed by The Australia-Indonesia Centre and led by Dr Sisilia Halimi of Universitas Indonesia and Professor Lesley Harbon of the University of Technology Sydney, researchers used their phones to take pictures of the ‘linguistic landscape’ around schools and their surrounds, in fact anywhere written text was evident.

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2016, Australia-Indonesia Collaboration

Healthcare for the ‘missing middle’

Around 100 million Indonesians don’t have health coverage, despite a bold national overhaul in 2014 of Indonesian healthcare aimed at bringing all the historically-fragmented insurance schemes together into the Jaminan Kesehatan Nasional (JKN), or National Health Insurance Programme. Indonesian and Australian researchers want to know how this can be improved.

The scheme sought to capture those who fall through the gaps, to achieve universal health coverage for all by 2019. Referred to as the ‘missing middle,’ they’re the people who aren’t destitute and receiving government help, but are still too poor to afford basic healthcare.

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2016, Australia-Indonesia Collaboration

Detecting high risk pregnancies in Indonesia

Women in Indonesia were 21 times more likely to die from childbirth than women in Australia in 2015.

Many pregnant women in Indonesia, particularly in remote areas, do not regularly visit health clinics, and so complications are not detected and dealt with early enough.

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2016, Australia-Indonesia Collaboration

New targets for tuberculosis vaccine

Better vaccines are needed for the global fight against tuberculosis (TB) with nine million new cases annually. Indonesia had more than 320,000 reported cases in 2014, while Australia’s reported cases were just over 1,000. But the rise of drug-resistant TB poses a threat to all countries.

Two proteins from the tuberculosis bacterium have shown promising results in investigations for a new vaccine in mice. Scientists from Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yogyakarta, with colleagues from the Centenary Institute and the University of Sydney in Australia, have found that the injected proteins can prime the immune system to induce protection against TB in mice.

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